wherein we entertain the notions of a creature embroiled in sorting multiple identities. is she a mother? a poet? a performer? an organizer? or is she simply the product of a feminist movement in which women dreamt that simultaneously singing opera, tap-dancing, spinning plates, spouting rhetoric and solving algorithms was liberation. here are the rough drafts.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The History At Home | 17. The Mothers

I. Great Great Grandmother Luisa

Dona Luisa's legs stretched to the tops of mountains.I heard she could stopper volcanoes. One finger dammingthe surging flame, she arranged landscapes to her own liking.Moved mountains into a personal staircase to the universelike most women fuss over flower arrangements.

Around her waist, Dona Luisa wore a paper cut sharp machete.She used it to cut off a man's leg once when she descendedfrom her mountaintop. Eighty crystal petticoats leapt and flashedflares of rainbows during her swirling warrior dance.

When Dona Luisa flew to the U.S. from Panama, it took an Act Of Congress. In the bedroom of my great grandmother's Brooklyn brownstoneDona Luisa sits straight backed and muted by Spanishin this new world. Proud and dignified at 95,she smiles at me with blind eyes.

II. Great Grandmother Carrington

Madame Adina grew the only known replica of Eden.I heard it went on for acres (immense & defiant fertility,sonic explosions of life eternally flowering and fruiting )amidst the chaos, ruin, garbage and concrete of modern Brooklyn.

Madame Adina sang seeds to sprout cradled in her brown sugar palms.Hummed window pane clear notes around the hearth fire,while she transformed the abundance at her back doorinto the ambrosia of revolution. Fed Ghana and Tanzaniatheir first freedom songs and sent them home to root.

Sister Maida danced on time zones like a tight rope walker.I heard she could walk through thin air. Had penetratedthe deepest jungles of Africa, America and Indiawith the whisper of magic words she alone created& armed only with the ever-changing moon in her hands.

Sister Maida's thin smooth silver arrowslodged in the heart of monsters so potently insidiousthey could only be called in the low vernacular,capitalists. Even pierced by her thin gray shaftsthey labored on. & three times around the world she spunas new countries sprang up like flowers in her footprints.

Basking in a warm elegance of color,the rich tones of equality,solidarity makes me live her words.

IV. Mother

emerged full grown from her father's head laughing,

her helmet fashionably cocked to one side and armedwith gray calculations designed to unsettle the world.

She forced continents together like siblings. Relaxedin the ocean of her own generosity. The battleground

of her desk always sticky with the goreof peace treaties between resource and poverty.

Soft talk, glitter, tinkling, rustles in the morning,sacrifices of broiled grapefruit to the immortal fivepounds and being told to clean my room.